The Fight to Shatter Realty Management's Male Mystique

Barbara Tillman, who heads the renting staff at a large New York City apartment development, tells of the ridicule that she and other real estate women have encountered from maintenence men when seeking to learn the workings of air‐conditioning or other complex building systems.

Adrienne Levatino, director of a municipal housing program in Evanston, Ill., tells of walking into a City Council Committee meeting and hearing a male voice crack, “It's nice to have a pair of legs in here.”

Mary Pinkard, who deals with fair housing and equal opportunity issues as an official of the United States Department of Housing and Urban Development, says her agency's record in promoting women is better than the records of most Cabinet departments; yet only 5 percent of the senior management positions in the department are filled by women.

Discrimination against women as housing consumers has long been charged by feminists and detailed in studies that show. the greater obstacles women often face in qualifying for home mortgages and apartments.

But inquiries in a dozen regions show that, although women have been making gains in these professions—and are conspicuous in at least two areas, apartment‐building management and the selling and brokerage of homes—sex discrimination in the housing professions is generally felt by women to remain widespread.

Field Called Too Technical

Even women who have achieved responsible positions in housingrelated professions frequently say they feel that they are regarded patronizingly by male colleagues, as well as by male subordinates. They also complain that too often they do the same jobs for less pay than men.

Not all women in the housing professions feel this way, of course. Some share the view of Barbara McCarver, the president of the Houston Board of Realtors and head of a realty concern with 40 agents, who says she has been “favorably treated by men all the years I have been in business—I have never felt discriminated against because I was a woman.”

Still other women, and men, respond to the discrimination charge by noting that the highest housing official in the country is a woman. Carla A. Hills, the outgoing Secretary of Housing and Urban Development and that President‐elect Jimmy Carter has nominated another woman, Patricia Roberts Harris, to succeed her.

But for those who see sex discrimination as still a major problem in the private and public housing fields, Mrs. Hills and Mrs. Harris are simply conspicuous exceptions—testimony, in fact, to how far women still have to go in housing and other fields.

They note that Mrs. Hills is the only woman Cabinet member in the Ford AdminstratIon, and that Mrs. Harris and Juanita M. Kreps, Mr. Carter's nominee for Secretary of Commerce, would bring to five the total of women Cabinet members in the nation's history.

Moreover, they argue, “tokens at the top,” as one woman put it, do not reflect the overall situation in the housing professions.

Over all, Government and industry data, as well as numerous interviews with men and women in housing and related professions, show that women tend to be concentrated in the management and brokerage sectors, and to be only a small part of the planning, design, financing, development, construction and appraisal fields.

The 1970 census found that 40 percent of building managers and superintendents in the country, and 33 percent of real estate agents and brokers, were women. But women totaled only 4 percent of real estate appraisers, 2 percent of the managers, administrators and craft workers on construction jobs and fewer than 1 percent of construction inspectors.

In all of these fields, the median earnings of women were less than those of men, in some cases significantly so. Among building managers and superintendents, the 51,000 men had a median income of $7,419 a year, while the 35,000 women had a median of $2,942.

Housing Generally a ‘Man's World’

James Threatt, head of the office of community development in Kansas City, Mo., said that while there were many women real estate agents, housing generally “has been a man's world, particularly in the development and rehabilitation industry.”

“Aside from the question of physical ability, there are some natural biases against women which are not based on whether or not they can pick up rocks,” he asserted.

Maxine Brown of San Francisco, head of the housing task force of the National Organization for Women and former chief of the urbanization and development division of the Association of Bay Area Gov ernments, held that “the two greatest areas of discrimination are the housing finance area and the building trades.”

But some housing professionals, men and women, argued that the low number of women in the finance and construction sectors did not necessarily reflect discrimination.

Bruce Heckman, director of community development in Highland Park, Ill., said that men “are usually more interested” in the financial and investment aspects.

Marian Smith, one of the relatively few women home builders, whose company has put up several hundred small houses in northern Virginia since the 1950's, also said that women “feel that this is something very complicated.”

Some male real estate executives commented that women were more involved in the apartment‐management area because they were more attuned to the “housekeeping details” involved in the job and to its “social aspects,” such as handling relations among tenants.

Miss Levatino, the housing program director in Evanston, said, “You don't see women being recruited by the building trades unions. You don't see the unions saying to women, ‘Come on in, join our apprenticeship program.'”

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A version of this archives appears in print on January 10, 1977, on Page 42 of the New York edition with the headline: The Fight to Shatter Realty Management's Male Mystique. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe